Criminal Justice News

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The U.S. Department of Justice today hosted a meeting to launch a
joint task force between the United Kingdom and the United States to
counter online child exploitation.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman of the Justice
Department’s Criminal Division and U.K. Minister for Policing, Criminal
Justice and Victims Damian Green made the announcement.

“Sexual predators are using technology to exploit and harm children, and
we need to consider whether technology-based solutions can help curb
this abuse and give parents the tools they need to keep their children
safe,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Raman. “Law enforcement
is committed to protecting children from abuse, but we know that the
help and support of the innovators in the tech community are critical to
this important effort. We look forward to collaborating with experts
throughout the digital industry on the work of this taskforce.”

“Child abuse is a vile crime,” said Minister Green.
“
The UK government is working hard with partners in the US to ensure
the Internet cannot be used to sexually abuse children or trade child
abuse imagery no matter how technically savvy an offender may be.
We have set up the US-UK task force to counter online child
exploitation and are drawing on the brightest and best minds from across
industry, law enforcement and academia to
tackle the dark web, catch abusers and make it much more difficult to access child abuse images
online.
Today experts from the online industry were invited to attend
the first task force meeting, and more companies, both large and small,
will be invited to join us in the coming months.”

The task force – co-chaired by Acting Assistant Attorney General Raman
and Minister Green – was established to find new technological solutions
to combat child sexual exploitation crimes on the Internet and to
reduce the volume of child sexual exploitation images online.
The task force members include the FBI, Homeland Security
Investigations of the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.K.
National Crime Agency’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
Command.

The growth of crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children on
the Internet is a significant law enforcement challenge shared by all
countries.
An epidemic volume of child sexual exploitation images is
stored and transmitted online by offenders whose crimes are increasingly
facilitated by evolving and complex technologies.
The task force will seek to leverage the intellectual talent
and technical resources of the digital industry by forming and
collaborating with an Industry Solutions Group, which will include
experts from sectors across the industry to help address the varied and
complex technical issues and challenges raised by online child
exploitation offenses.

The task force will report back to the U.S. Attorney General and U.K. Prime Minister on its achievements in November 2014.